
Remember last year, when all eyes were on a proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero? Protesters and politicians railed against the project, arguing that it disgraced hallowed ground.
Well, the center's organizers are finally opening an exhibit in the space. So, what's the Sharia-infused project in question, you ask? A photography exhibit, featuring portraits of children from around the world living in New York City.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)A year after the controversy over the so-called "Ground Zero mosque" started fading from the national scene, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) on Wednesday hosted a screening of a film that deems the planned cultural center "another type of Islamic jihad."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Rep. Allen West (R-FL) is sponsoring a Capitol Hill screening of what his office deems a "controversial" film that labels the plan for the so-called Ground Zero mosque "yet another type of Islamic jihad."
West's office announced Tuesday that the Tea Party favorite would hold a press conference outside the Capitol building on Wednesday morning which would be followed by a screening of the film in the Rayburn House office building.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)A Manhattan judge has thrown out a lawsuit from a retired firefighter who sued to block construction on the proposed Park51 Islamic Center near Ground Zero, but the conservative group that represented him says it will appeal the decision.
Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders was cleared of all five charges in the Netherlands on Thursday, where he had faced up to a year in prison for allegedly inciting violence through his anti-Islam rhetoric.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Pamela Geller, the most vocal of the activists opposed to the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" to be built two blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center, said Friday that the Conservative Political Action Conference she was speaking at had itself been "corrupted" and "compromised by Muslim Brotherhood activists."
Speaking at a non-official CPAC event on Friday afternoon, Geller said that many members of the board of the American Conservative Union had to go because they were allowing the event to be infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood activists.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)At the Conservative Political Action Conference next month -- the one decried as being "infiltrated" by the Muslim Brotherhood by the likes of sharia alarmist Frank Gaffney -- an event will be held titled, "The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks."
The event is a movie premiere, hosted by mosque opposition leader Pamela Geller and her partner Robert Spencer. It will be followed by "a question and action and strategy session on how to stop the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)A group of lawyers for a retired firefighter want to legally stop Park51 from building its planned Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero.
The group, the American Center for Law and Justice, filed a motion in the New York Supreme Court on Tuesday asking for an injunction against any demolition or construction at the site of the old Burlington Coat Factory in downtown Manhattan. A group of developers and an imam want to turn the building into a community center.
But the firefighter, Timothy Brown, is one of those trying to stop the center from being built. With the ACLJ, he sued the city in August, challenging the Landmarks Preservation Commission's decision not to grant the building landmark status, which would have prevented developers from building their community center.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Pamela Geller is planning to hold another protest next week against the proposed Islamic Center near Ground Zero, or as she calls it, "the Ground Zero Victory Mosque."
This January 12 protest will be held at a City Council meeting, called to decide whether to build Wal-Mart stores in New York City. Geller argues that the City Council wants to say "no to Wal-Mart but yes to the Islamic supremacist mosque. The limousine liberals deign to deny the working class and the poor jobs and prices they can afford."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Pam Geller, everyone's favorite bikini-clad Islamophobe, is celebrating the power her demagoguery has to grab headlines upon the news that the debate over the "Ground Zero Mosque" was the most followed issue this year.
The debate, Geller says, "changed the course of human events."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (1)Nine years after Sept. 11, 2001, America saw perhaps its worst outbreak of Islamophobia since the attacks. Experts wagered it came from the aimless fear and the anger people feel in times of economic crisis, exploited by certain politicians looking to give their party an advantage in the midterms and turned toward American Muslims.
Such an outbreak was possible in the days and months after Sept. 11's attacks. It never really materialized, experts say, in part because President George W. Bush stood up and told the nervous country that Islam is a religion of peace, and that American was not at war with Muslims.
He made no such appeal this year, and President Obama's pleas fell on deaf ears or, more accurately, ears that believe Obama himself is secretly, and sinisterly, Muslim.
Without further ado, then, is This Year in Islamophobia:
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch has filed a petition with the New York State Supreme Court demanding that NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg release all records of communication with the leader of the future Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan as well as a slew of other Muslim groups.
"Mayor Bloomberg's support for the Ground Zero mosque needs to be fully explored. New Yorkers are going to want to know how closely he's working with the radicals supporting the Ground Zero mosque," the president of Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton, said in a press release. "It is troubling that the Mayor's office cannot be bothered to comply with the open records law. What is the Mayor's office hiding?"
Park51, the proposed Islamic community center and mosque in downtown Manhattan, has applied for federally-funded grants, prompting shrill cries that the "Ground Zero mosque" is looking for a taxpayer handout.
The Daily Beast reported yesterday that Park51 had applied for $5 million worth of grants. The organization, in a statement, acknowledged applying for a grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Park51 says it would use the money both for its construction and services it plans to offer, including domestic violence prevention and foreign language classes.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Vincent Forras, a Sept. 11 first responder who ran for Senator in Connecticut and opposes the building of a mosque near ground zero, told TPM that those against the Islamic Center have been unfairly characterized as bigots.
"My filing of a lawsuit or my trying to prevent this has absolutely nothing to do with me being against Islam or Muslims or anything other than that mosque near Ground Zero," Forras said. "So for me to be referred to as a blind bigot or a racist because I'm doing that, that just shows how weak their case is that they're resorted to calling me something that I haven't been called in my entire life."
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Christians -- including Catholics, Mormons and Protestants -- are more likely to think the Park51 Islamic center in downtown Manhattan should be re-located further away from Ground Zero than non-Christians, says a new poll.
The media furor around the planned community center, which will include a prayer space, has died down. But the center is still being planned and it's unlikely to escape controversy between now and its completion.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (1)A member of the Westboro Baptist Church who represented the fringe church before the Supreme Court in a freedom of speech case on Wednesday tells TPMMuckraker that they support the right of Muslims to build an Islamic cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero.
"Of course" Muslims should be able to build the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center in New York City, Margie J. Phelps told TPMMuckraker in an interview Thursday. She said it would be hypocritical for the United States to not allow construction to proceed, and called opponents of the mosque un-American.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Randall Terry is going ahead with his plan to rip up statements from the Koran in New York City and Washington, D.C.
His first event will take place Wednesday morning near the proposed site of the Cordoba mosque, while his press conference on Thursday will take place near the headquarters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in D.C.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The village of Sidney, NY asked a Muslim group dig up two bodies they buried in a small cemetery on land they own because, the town contends, the burial plots are illegal.
But town supervisor Bob McCarthy doesn't know which law they broke. "I don't know what the exact law is," he said.
In a phone interview with TPMMuckraker on Wednesday, McCarthy said that he was being "harassed" by media calls, and said he's not an expert on the law.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Robert Spencer, the author of JihadWatch.org, says he first became aware of the threat of Sharia "after seeing repeated attempts to assert the primacy of Islamic law over American law." One of those early attempts, he told TPMmuckraker, came in late 2006, when Muslim cab drivers in Minnesota made news by refusing to take passengers carrying alcohol. The incidents resulted in the cabbies going to the back of the queue, letting passengers with booze get into another cab.
Spencer has been one of a handful of neocons -- along with Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes, among others -- who have been sounding the alarm about Sharia law for years. They warn that Sharia, a system of laws defined by the Koran, is taking hold in the United States, and that it will eventually threaten the very Constitution.
Their warnings, so long spoken from the fringe, are now at the heart of today's anti-mosque rhetoric.
We started digging in the archives to find the origin of this fear. What we found may not be conclusive, but it shows a path that has lead to increasingly mainstream figures, like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, calling for a federal ban on Sharia law.
The aspiring film student who allegedly stabbed a cab driver because he was a Muslim told cops that he was being prosecuted because of his Irish heritage and faith when he was arrested last month.
"You're prosecuting me because I'm Irish Catholic," Michael Enright told cops, according to new court documents revealed Wednesday, the New York Daily News reported.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (2)Muslim-Americans "continue to struggle for acceptance in many communities" and "have not yet realized the full promise of equal opportunity and equal justice" the government's top civil rights official, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, said Tuesday.
Speaking at an event on Capitol Hill marking the 10th anniversary of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, Perez's comments came in the midst of the heated debate over the proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan and of mosque construction projects around the country.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has begun monitoring eight separate cases of alleged discrimination against Muslims under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) since May 2010, according to a report issued Tuesday.
"We see a spike, regrettably," said Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez in a speech before the American Constitution Society. A spokeswoman declined to name the individual investigations, but confirmed that the department was monitoring those cases and had not yet opened full investigations.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (2)If today's rally against the Park51 Islamic center was an exercise in contradictions about tolerance, then Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders was the perfect pick for keynote speaker. In his remarks Wilders repeatedly lauded America's record of tolerance while asserting that "openness can never be open-ended. A tolerant society is not a suicidal society."
"We must never give a free hand to those who want to subjugate us," Wilder said. "New York is rooted in Dutch tolerance. New York is tolerant, not intolerant. What if New York was intolerant?" Then it "would not be New York, it would be Mecca."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (1)In downtown Manhattan today, about 1,500 people gathered to protest the planned Park51 Islamic center near Ground Zero. Speakers assured the crowd that it's not that they're intolerant, because this isn't about tolerance, exactly -- but so what if it is, because Islam is intolerant? Or something.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Pastor Terry Jones said this morning that his church has canceled its planned Koran burning permanently.
"Not today, not ever," Jones said on the Today show this morning after flying to New York last night. "We're not going to go back and do it. It is totally canceled."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (1)When the ceremonies conclude in New York City today for the ninth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, some of the commemorators will break off to attend a different kind of rally -- one that brings the Islamophobic fervor of the past few weeks to a head.
Today at 3 p.m. ET, at the proposed site for Park51 on Park Place and West Broadway in downtown Manhattan, people will gather for the "FDI/SIOA 9/11 Rally of Remembrance: Yes to Freedom, No to Ground Zero Mosque," a rally in opposition to the planned Islamic center.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (1)In a straight-to-DVD movie that will premiere tomorrow night in D.C., Newt Gingrich and Citizens United warn Americans of the impending threat of radical Islam. As one of their talking heads says in the trailer, "This is the end of times. This is the final struggle."
The movie, called "America At Risk," paints the world as a dangerous place filled with radicalized Muslims who want to -- and, importantly, can -- destroy America.
"The war on terror, and the ideology behind it, have only just begun," Gingrich's wife, Callista Gingrich, intones while she and Gingrich stand in front of a green-screened New York skyline.
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Pastor Terry Jones, appearing on today's morning shows, says he will not be burning Korans on Saturday even though the imam of a planned Islamic center near Ground Zero did not agree to move his project further from the site.
"Right now, we have plans not to do it," Jones said on Good Morning America.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)According to the AP, pastor Terry Jones says his Koran burning is suspended, but not canceled, after finding out a New York City imam did not agree to move his Islamic center further from Ground Zero.
Jones told reporters that a different imam from Orlando, who was trying to convince Jones not to burn a stack of Korans on Sept. 11, "clearly, clearly lied to us."
Donald Trump today sent a letter to the developer of the Cordoba House, offering to buy the building proposed for the downtown Manhattan Islamic center for 25 percent more than the developer paid for it.
"I am making this offer as a resident of New York and citizen of the United States, not because I think the location is a spectacular one (because it is not), but because it will end a very serious, inflammatory, and highly divisive situation that is destined, in my opinion, to only get worse," Trump said in a letter, according to Bloomberg.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, one of the ostensibly mainstream politicians who has come out vocally against building an Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan, today spoke out against a Florida church's plan to burn Korans on Sept. 11.
"People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation -- much like building a mosque at Ground Zero," Palin wrote in a press release. "Book burning is antithetical to American ideals."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)As Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center gets ready to burn copies of the Koran at his Gainesville, Florida church this Saturday (September 11), many national voices are calling for him to change his plans. House Minority Leader John Boehner, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and RGA Chairman Haley Barbour have all criticized the planned Koran burning. And Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander of the Afghanistan War, has gone as far as to say that the plan could put American troops in danger.
But as Jones forges full-speed ahead with his incendiary event, some of the nation's most prominent Islamophobic voices have expressed their opposition (though usually with caveats), to Jones' idea....
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You know the stories, by now: The violent attack on a cab driver, the arson in Tennessee, the sometimes unbelievable vitriol associated with a Manhattan Islamic community center. The plans by a radical pastor to burn the holy book of another religion, plans that have been condemned even by his compatriots on the fringe of American thought.
But why? And why now?
"It's been percolating," John Esposito, the director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown, told TPM. As Esposito tells it, America has had a problem with anti-Muslim prejudice since before Sept. 11, 2001. But it was contained, in a way, and even after 9/11 "things were pretty stabilized." The uptick began in 2004, and now it's rising to the surface.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Attorney General Eric Holder, after meeting with interfaith leaders this afternoon, released a statement this afternoon saying that anti-Muslim violence won't be tolerated.
"As the Attorney General has noted on previous occasions, violence against individuals or institutions based on religious bias is intolerable and the Department will bring anyone who commits such crimes to justice," spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement.
At the meeting, Miller said, "the Attorney General reiterated the Department's strong commitment to prosecuting hate crimes, and noted several successes the Department has achieved in recent months."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Rabbi David Saperstein -- one of the religious leaders meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder this afternoon to discuss anti-Muslim incidents -- told TPM in an interview that he is satisfied with the government's reaction to hate crimes, but said he wants the administration to speak out against the wave of anti-Islamic furor.
Saperstein, of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said that it is very important for a top government official like Holder or President Barack Obama need to speak out against the anti-Muslim rhetoric that has flared up in recent months.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (1)Religious leaders from several faiths are meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder today to discuss the recent spate of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence.
At a press conference this afternoon following an interfaith meeting, Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said he and other religious leaders will meet with Holder, at Holder's request, later today.
The Justice Department confirms and says they will release a "readout" of the meeting after it occurs.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (1)As anti-Muslim sentiment appears to be on the rise throughout the country, with high-profile protests against mosque construction and a handful of violent episodes against Muslims, Muslim groups are pushing back.
Last Monday, a group of young Muslim professionals from the D.C. area launched My Faith My Voice, a web site that encourages fellow Muslims to upload their own PSAs explaining that although they are Muslim, they're not terrorists.
"When we see our loyalty as Americans questioned, that's something we take very seriously," the group's lawyer, Hassan Ahmad, told TPM. "The point of the campaign is one of bridge building, reassurance, an invitation to listen to who we actually are ... that Americans of other faiths will lend an ear and listen."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (1)Remember the birther infomercial, produced by LivePrayer.com, that asked viewers for $30 for a "got a birth certificate?" bumper sticker?
The man behind it, Bill Keller, is now railing against the Islamic center planned for lower Manhattan. He says he'll be holding Sunday services from a room at the Marriott across from Ground Zero every weekend until he can find a permanent spot for his "9/11 Christian Center."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (3)The majority of New Yorkers want the developers of Park51, known to its opponents as the "Ground Zero mosque," to voluntarily move the community center further from Ground Zero -- but the majority also acknowledges the developers' right to build there if they want.
Newt Gingrich doesn't feel that way. In a radio interview today, he said he wants the national government to step in and stop the developers from building the Islamic community center by whatever means necessary.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (1)The Department of Justice is investigating two recent, high-profile anti-Muslim incidents, TPMmuckraker confirms.
A DOJ spokeswoman says the department has opened investigations into the attack on a Muslim cab driver in New York City and an apparent arson at the site of a future mosque in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
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